Curator Spotlights Nearly 400-Year-Old Chair At Harvard Art Museums Gallery Talk

The Harvard Art Museums held a gallery talk Wednesday centered on the oldest object in their American collection — a nearly 400-year-old chair that dates back to a 17th century Essex County household.

Horace D. Ballard, the museum’s curator of American art, led the talk, discussing the chair’s material history, its ties to Wampanoag Nation, and the broader argument for preserving objects not traditionally considered museum-worthy.

The chair, which Ballard dated to around 1670, remained in a single Essex County family for roughly 300 years before entering the museum’s collection in the latter half of the 20th century.

Known as a “great chair,” it was the largest seat in a New England home of its era — a marker of status within the household.

Ballard said the chair’s design reflected the social customs of the period. Its wide seat accommodated a corseted matriarch who needed to rise without the chair shifting beneath her, and its handles were built not for comfort while seated but to aid in standing.

“The chair is thought to be a sign of respect, but gentility,” Ballard said.

He said he believes the chair’s structural core was originally walnut brought from Europe, though centuries of repair have substantially altered its composition with layers of paint and maple being added.

“My best guess is that parts of this assemblage, which is now a chair, was brought over from Europe, and over the years, when those folks settled around our area, it was remade, repaired, reformulated,” Ballard said.

The chair carries five distinct layers of paint, he said, and each coat was applied to unify the object’s appearance as replacement parts were introduced over time.

The chair’s seat is made out of rush and is at least the second seat the chair has had, replacing an original leather cushion stuffed with animal hair. The rush was produced by the Wampanoag Nation, reflecting a relationship between Native American craftspeople and English settlers that Ballard said was key to early colonial life.

“When woodworkers came over from England, they had knowledge, but that knowledge was not enough to sustain their lives,” he said. “They needed Indigenous knowledge, and the Indigenous knowledge and those deep relationships and community helped.”

Ballard said the chair’s place in the museum reflects a broader argument about what objects deserve preservation. He said ordinary families extended the same devotion to everyday objects that institutions have historically reserved for portraits and silver.

“The eldest son got the portraits, the eldest daughter got the silver, and the third son got the furniture,” he said of the family’s inheritance customs — a pattern, he added, common among wealthy New England families of the period.

He said the chair is also among the most pedagogically useful objects in the collection.

“I think it dignifies the way that children care for things over time, how things descend,” he said. “That passing, that holding on, that preserving, I think it’s a beautiful thing. It’s very human. And I think it deserves to be lionized in a way.”

—Staff writer Shalini N. Ramchune can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at shaliniramchune.03. Follow her on X @ShaliniRamchune.